Carla Mae's Blog

If vows added to the baptismal promises identify certain life-styles, and the counsel of poverty vowed publicly reminds the whole Church that “You can’t take it with you when you go,” what is this celibacy thing all about? The married must be chastely celibate to all except their marriage partner. They sign the fruitful love of Christ Jesus in their marital love. But what does total celibate chastity mean for religious   who vow this counsel publicly? What does their vow of chastity mean in an age of recreational sex? Catherine of Siena believed that poverty was the most basic of the counsels, for if the human heart if fixed on a relationship with the Holy One as its one non-negotiable, then celibate love and a listening heart fall right in place. Sandra Schneiders, IHM, takes another view. She is convinced that only someone wildly in love could vow poverty and obedience as a life-style. I think they are both right. Catherine, from the angle of a basic value, a...

It’s here. Lent has come. We’ve been here before. What might be different this year? What might be different is that we are different. We are in a different place. This is most obvious nationally and politically. But what about spiritually? What about the hidden garden of my heart? Lent is the time for cleaning out the garden…of the soul. It’s time to get rid of the trash, the old growth, the dead stuff. Why? Well, if you look carefully, you will see all sorts of new growth starting underneath the trash. So, clear it away…give the new a chance to grow! But if I’m honest, I may not want to go there and do that. So, where am I going to go in this garden of mine? The wise Mother-Church takes us by the hand in the scriptures and leads us through the gate. First, there will be the desert, and we will learn that this is going to take work, and forces are going to gather to stop us. Then we climb a mountain, and surprise! We are shown what we will look like when the work is done...

We are into “ordinary” time, which only means that we are in between the two great mysteries of our salvation: the incarnation and the redemption. But make no mistake. Things are far from ordinary. The light has just been toned down just a bit. We walk by faith. What is faith? We are used to thinking it’s an intellectual acceptance of what we cannot see. But if we go back to the original Greek that the evangelists used, we get a surprise. The word is pistis , and it means “to cling to, to adhere to as with glue.” Now I don’t know about you, but that grabs me, no pun intended. Faith means we cling to God and God’s Word as a magnet clings to the refrigerator door. Faith means we “sniff out” where life is, like the newborn puppy with eyes tight shut, pumping its little legs until it finds where to nurse. Faith is newly hatched baby birds, eyes tight shut, and no feathers, with mouths wide open, waiting for the food that comes after they feel mom or dad land on the branch. Faith is anot...

As we inaugurated our 45 th president of the United States, 600 Dominicans from around the world gathered in Rome with Francis to close the 800 th Anniversary celebration of the founding of the Dominican Order. We are fresh from that wondrous anniversary. The challenges we face now often draw from our charism, from our ministerial situations, or from our cultural realities. I’d like to ponder the “background music” to all of these. I mean the counsels we have taken upon ourselves by vow. The counsels are radical Christian values that identify us as folks living within the lifestyle called consecrated life. Like the married, we have a set of vows added to our baptismal vows. These public vows witness to something, just as the married, by their wedding vows, witness to the faithful love of Jesus for his people. Those in religious life witness to the counsels as signs of the kingdom already in our midst. The counsel of Poverty has nothing to do with destitution. Destitution i...

Pioneering in 2017...? In a recent article on religious life sent to us by the Executive Team, the word “pioneer” is used several times. It brought back an image that was used after Vatican II to describe what was happening in the Church as a result of the Council. From being quite “settled” as a result of colonization, writers were calling us to become “pioneers,” a “Church in the World.” So we roused ourselves from our security and “got on the road.” We began to go to public universities. We started talking to folks in other faith traditions. Dominicans founded Network in Washington, D.C., and the term “political ministry” became part of our vocabulary. Women’s Dominican communities took this pioneering call very seriously.  We are entering a new year. It is 2017. What might the term “pioneer” mean for us now, 52 years from the close of the council? In a time in our history when religious life as we have known it is not receiving candidates? Where are we to “go?” Wha...

Pray, Ponder, Preach for January, 2017, Carla Mae Streeter, OP                                                 …your Light has Come… Thomas Merton once wrote that people would be surprised if he told them they were walking around shining like the sun. I suspect they would be more than surprised – they would be incredulous. We don’t feel lightsome. We don’t see light streaming from us. It’s just not our experience. Yet feeling and seeing and our experience are often far from the facts. The Christmas season is about light. Our light has come. The scriptures proclaim it, the songs sing it, and the decorations, indoors and out, celebrate it. So what is this light, and if it is already ours, why do we feel so heavy, so enveloped in darkness? Th...

How we Do it... The word contemplation can mean different things to different people. How do Dominicans understand it? As we continue to more intentionally reclaim this core of our spirituality in all our deliberations, it is good to revisit the distinctive take we Dominicans have on contemplation. Clarifying this would be an important step as we complete the celebration of our 800 th Anniversary. The recently deceased Paul Philibert, OP, in his research has uncovered something rather interesting. The way Dominicans understand contemplation is revealed in Dominic’s Nine Ways of Prayer. For the perceptive eye, there is a flow in these ways of prayer. First, there is reverencing, shown in our customs of bows and prostrations. Then there is pleading, in the raised and outstretched arms, and finally there is the silent and absorbed meditative reading and study which ends up witnessing. The movement is a bit like breathing… reverencing, pleading, witnessing . The Dominican...